The KDE Project todayannounced
the release of KDE 3.1, "a major feature upgrade to the third
generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop for Linux
and other UNIXes."
While you are busy downloading
the new packages for this fabulous release, we hope you will enjoy the
über-cool (disclaimer:
I wrote it) KDE
3.1 Feature Guide, as well as a sortableKDE 3.1 Requirements
page, both new for this release. And if that's not enough, you can also
check out the detailedChangeLog. And - ah yes - there are also screenshots. So much to do today . . . .

We were so excited to be included in the 3.1 release. At first it was going to be very close to our 3.0 so our feature set was small... then the date slipped and we worked on sanitzing even the most obscure bugs and tweaking for speed... then we started back porting some of our 3.2 work... Then when we were thinking in perpetual release candidate mode packages really were set to final instead. So we missed getting the last few changes to 3.1 in the tarball. (Changes that made it to quanta-3.1-kde-3.0) Oops!

They are in the 3.1 branch and we will diff the package and put up a patch for download for anyone who would like it. Check the Quanta page in the next day or so for the patch. Enjoy KDE 3.1 and thanks to everyone who has made Quanta so popular. We are proud and honored to be included with such great software and great people.

PS Look for an announcement on the big easter egg in KDE 3.1 in a week or so when the dust settles. It's Kommander, the text manipulation/DCOP/scripting visual dialog builder and executor.

Obviously KDE_3_1_BRANCH will be slightly better than what is released now. There is always some delay between making tarballs, getting distributors to create binary packages and allowing mirrors to catch up and the happy release note.

I hope your changes are not critical for Quanta to work properly.. and hey, we need to provide users with a reason to upgrade to 3.1.1 next month. ;-)

"Obviously KDE_3_1_BRANCH will be slightly better than what is released now. "

That's what 3.1.1 will be good for :-) The differences aren't too many right now because most annoying bugs have been fixed during the security delay. I think that this is the best .0 release a project could make *ever* :-))

Nah, mostly little things that always become the emails that start "why didn't you do such and such" and ironcally a splash screen that I hope will lessen the number of times I read "dude yer spash screen sucks". ;-)

> and hey, we need to provide users with a reason to upgrade to 3.1.1 next month. ;-)

Now you're talkin'! We're on it. Ironically that is about the time frame for finishing a number of features we've been working on for PHP support that is second to none.

oh yeah. i'm using gentoo, and this is one of the down points of using such a great system. i get to wait a day before i can test drive the new KDE (though i was using rc6 on one of my systems). If'n one day they get that distcc working nicely, i would think my network could build a working kde in a few hours maybe.

The new feature list is amazing, and the shots are impressive.
KDE is really the best desktop, and finally there is no doubt that soon or later sun, redhat and co will adopt kde as the standart desktop!

But I didn't see kvim integration into kate, kmail and kdevelop, does anyone knows when it will be included, and how I how i could probably configure kde to use kvim as my text control?

There's a patch out there for KMail that'll give you the KTextEditor/Vimpart
integration right now. In fact, I'm using it myself - editing all my mail with
vim. Coolness. Also, the vimpart will allow you to embed vim into konqueror,
and other apps like kdevelop 3 (gideon) and even kwrite!

Here's the steps ( it's possible these may be prettied up a bit and thrown on the
web somewhere ):

I've installed 'vimpart' according to the above instructions and have been able to select 'vim' from the component chooser, however I have no 'Vim Component Configuration' so when I try to start it up from kdevelop 3.0 I just get a message stating that the vim component needs to be configured - Anyone any idea what needs to be done to configure this.
I'm using version 3.1.2 of KDE.

While KDE really is very impressive (nice work and congratulations), there is really no hope of it becoming the standard desktop for SUN or Red Hat.

Both are deeply involved in GNOME and GNOME 2.2 really is very nice as well.

The single biggest problem for SUN is that they have lots of commercial third party developers. SUN does not want to use a platform that someone totally controls commercial development on. If you want to develop commercial applications for KDE you need to purchase a commercial license from Trolltech. SUN does not want to be at Trolltechs mercy.

Do you think Microsoft would ever develop an operating system where their core libraries were owned and controlled by a seperate entity?

With GNOME, everyone can develop commercial software, even using the GNOME-libraries and not just GTK+.

There is of course no problems for free software, and still no problem for most developers, the licenses for Qt are not that expensive, but if you ever ask yourself why SUN as a developer of a platform instead of just third party software chose GNOME instead of KDE, one of the answers is pretty clear.

I have to say, KDE looks pretty damn slick, and again congratulations!

I'm sure it will be ages before there are Redhat 8 rpms, so I was thinking of using Konstruct. Anyone tried this yet? The instructions on the Konstruct page are very brief... I'm not quite sure how to go about this (other then downloading the source files on my 56k). Hopefully by the time I'm done downloading someone will have figured the build part out :)

I'm trying to right now (on RH8). I've been able to fix most of the compile errors that come up just by installing devel RPMS and playing with ldconfig, but I'm stuck at the moment.

Specifically, in the kdemultimedia-3.1/noatun/modules/dcopiface directory, it's failing because of references to VideoPlayObject in libartskde.so, and several "gsl_osc_" references in libartsmodules.so. Anyone have any ideas what I can do to fix it? The error message is below.

Konstruct works just fine under Redhat 8. Just follow the instructions. The question I have is how do you configure QT-COPY to use Redhat's xft2 configuration? That is all I would need to be a happy camper.

Hi, i am not able to use this patch, dont know what is wrong by me.
1. I try to apply the patch against qt-x11-3.1.1 -> the official qt-3.1.1 release from Troltech ( Should i use it only against qt-copy from KDE CVS ?
2. When i try to apply the patch i get the following error:
patching file x11/xfreetype.test
patch: **** malformed patch at line 4: LIBDIRS="$IN_LIBDIRS $XDIRS /usr/shlib /usr/lib /lib"

P.S. TurboLinux 8 KDE 3.1 RPMS can be used in RedHat 8.0 , they worked and there is antialiasing. BUT !: it is not so easy , first u have to build alsa-drivers and alsa-lib if u want to have sound. An there are other minor issues with KDM ....

I fetched and installed the sources with konstruct using 'make deep-patch' in meta/kde

I then patched xfreetype.test according to your instructions, but I can't do 'make -f Makefile.cvs', since I don't have the Makefile.cvs.

Also, I notice that you don't have '-xft' on your configure line - does this still somehow build with Xft support? If I include the '-xft' on the configure line, configure complains that the test for Xft fails ...

I got it pretty much built with konstruct on Red Hat 8.0. I had to tweak a Makefile when building some of the GL screensavers (manually added -lGLU, no idea why configure missed that), and I also tweaked a Makefile to not build some of the noatun plugins (they wanted /usr/lib/libesd.la and /usr/lib/libaudiofile.la - again, no idea). But other than that it's built, and seems to run...

BUT

No antialiased fonts. What gives? AA fonts work fine in the official KDE 3.0.x on Red Hat 8.0, what's changed in 3.1? Something to do with Qt?

Try perraw's advice in the reply above. On mine, I noticed that QT was configuring itself without Xft support, and I found someone's suggestion to add "-lfontconfig" to the OWN_CFLAGS variable. That worked for me, and I think perraw's approach might be a better way to handle it.

Yup, I think that's working. I had trouble patching Qt and getting everything to play nicely with Konstruct, so I downloaded and built Qt separately (following perraw's sample command-line), and set the HAVE_QT_3_1_INSTALLED define to TRUE in Konstruct's gar.conf.mk. I'm guessing there's a way to patch Konstruct to build Qt properly for RH8.0, but I'm not familiar enough with Konstruct to do that myself.

Only kdebase built so far, but konsole now appears to have antialiased fonts again, so looking good :)

For the benefit of those that are having trouble getting Konstruct to build KDE with XFT support, here are the steps I used . This has worked for me on two machines, but that's hardly a comprehensive QA so YMMV. Please let me know if this does not work for you, or if some of the more knowledgeable folks spot some problems with this process. I'm installing QT in /opt/qt-3.1.1 and KDE in /opt/kde-3.1, so wherever you see those entries in the process change them to your desired installation location.

Don't forget to edit your .bashrc and add the environment variables set in step 12 for any users that will be using the new KDE. And by the way, ccache (http://ccache.samba.org) is your friend when you are rebuilding KDE on a weekly basis.